Posted on 12/11/2021 9:27:32 AM PST by SamAdams76
If you are under 30, you will probably not understand.
There was a time when there were millions of these things across the United States. They were once as ubiquitous as stop signs as you could find on on just about every corner.
Every neighborhood bar had one. Every gas station. Every supermarket, restaurant, post office, convenience store, movie theaters, well, just about every public place you could think of.
And in places where people congregated in larger numbers, there were BANKS of these things. Airports, shopping malls, sports stadiums, and highway rest areas had rows of them!
I'm talking about the pay phone.
They were a marvel of technology in which you could drop a quarter in the slot (or aa dime for us older folks) and get the magical dial tone which would allow you to place a call to anybody in the country. If you weren't calling collect, you'd be prompted to feed additional coins at intervals lest your call be brought to a rather inglorious end. But if you called collect and your call was accepted, your initial coin would drop down into the coin slot like in a old-fashioned slot machine. Well, sometimes that happened, not always.
When I was young and poor, I used to walk around Logan Airport pushing my fingers into every return slot looking for that rare coin. When I found one (and sometimes several), I would get a rush of excitement that was never quite duplicated in my adult years. I also used to snag those baggage carts that passengers left lying around because they were too lazy to return them to the kiosk to get their quarter deposit. I would spend a Saturday morninig at Logan Airport doing this and would make an easy two or three dollars. One time, I found a crisp $20 bill on the sidewalk by where the taxis parked! But now I digress. But my point is, there is free money out there for those who want to hustle for it.
Those pay phones were once everywhere in America. They were also in our pop culture, showing up in many movies and in the verses of many popular songs. Here are some examples of pay phone showing up in songs:
Back when there were millions of pay phones in America, you could make a career of being a pay phone technician. Most of your service calls would involved cleaning chewing gum out of the coin slot, alcohol wiping handsets and unsticking buttons on the keyboard clogged up with people's sweat and who knows what else. But you would occasionally get a challenging service call which would involve taking the entire phone apart (453 replaceable parts!).
I would say that the early 1980s were the heyday of the telephone. Kids at the Crabtree mall would call their parents to come pick them up from a video arcade, with the sounds of PacMan and Space Invaders in the background. Anxious teenage girls would call their parents for a pickup from a date gone bad. Businessmen would get alerted with their newfangled pagers and have to scramble to the nearest payphone to retrieve their message. Stressed housewives would call their husband at work to say they their car broke down on the way back from their hairdressing appointment and was towed to a gas station by a guy named Al who is sitting outside in his idling Chevy Caprice waiting to drive her home (and hoping to stop for a drink or two along the way).
On military bases, soldiers would be lined up 10 deep waiting to use pay phones for that 10-minute phone call to mom. At bars, men would phone home to say they were "working late tonight" and not to wait up and the wives would then wonder why "Tush" by ZZ Top is blasting in the background with a bunch of clinking glasses. At airports, many were calling home to speak of flight delays and such. Occasionally, one would use a payphone to call in sick to work on the way to a fishing trip.
There used to be a time where you never left the house without a dime (or a quarter) so that you could place an emergency phone call if you ever needed to.
Ran across this site.
Maybe you could check out a local city (plug in your state) and see how current it is?
Link for California is below:
https://www.payphone-project.com/numbers/usa/CA/
There are quite a few in Canoga Park, Calif
https://www.payphone-project.com/numbers/usa/CA/CANOGA_PARK/
Nearby Chatsworth
https://www.payphone-project.com/numbers/usa/CA/CHATSWORTH/
A majority of payphone locations listed on The Payphone Project no longer exist. This collection of payphone numbers and locations is kept online for historical purposes.
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